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The lexicon of the blues
This will be quick, but they all are (one way or another).
Because I used to edit and assign book reviews for the print magazine, I still get books mailed to my home every now and again. In general I haven't had the heart to read about music for a while, but the book atop the stack is a history of King Records, written by Jon Hartely Fox (with a foreword by Dave Alvin). It's called King of the Queen City: The Story of King Records, and simply by mentioning it I've assuaged a tiny bit of guilt. And I hope it's a good book, that it reveals something about the magic and the mess that must've been the backstory of that label.
But that's not why I opened this file.
I opened this file because when Billy Joe Shaver sings about a Dominecker rooster I don't think most listeners have any idea what he means.
Much less what Sleepy John Estes was on about.
And so I'm tickled to note that on November 2 Stephen Calt published (through the University of Illinois Press, which means this was surely a labor of love, since we all know academic presses aren't rolling in money these days) a nearly 300-page book titled Barrelhouse Words: A Blues Dialect Dictionary. Calt, the one-sheet tells me, has also written or co-written I'd Rather Be The Devil: Skip James and the Blues and King of the Delta Blues: The Life and music of Charlie Patton. Neither of which I know.
Maybe this new volume, a dictionary after all, sounds dry.
I actually think it'd make a great nightstand book, or, for those of you who keep stupid joke books by the toilet, this one might upgrade your ambiance some.
I'm going to open at random and quote one here, to give you a flavor of the thing. And this really is a totally random choice...
raise sand
Cana't a woman act funny, quit you for another man?
She ain't gonna look at you straight but she's always raisin' sand
-- Blind Lemon Jefferson, "Got The Blues," 1926
To create a disturbance, slang derived from the British raise or kick up a dust, given by Grose (1796) as meaning "to make a disturbance or riot." Clapin (c. 1902) records it as a white expression meaning "to get furiously angry"; Tom Shaw (a protege of the above performer) saw raisin' sand as "fussin' and raisin' hell." The survival of this idioom in black speech is indicated by DCS and Smitherman (2000), which (like DAS 3) treat it as exclusively black.
End snippet.
How any of that ties into the Alison Krauss/Robert Plant album, I care not to comment.
Good fun, though, at least for word nerds.
Because I used to edit and assign book reviews for the print magazine, I still get books mailed to my home every now and again. In general I haven't had the heart to read about music for a while, but the book atop the stack is a history of King Records, written by Jon Hartely Fox (with a foreword by Dave Alvin). It's called King of the Queen City: The Story of King Records, and simply by mentioning it I've assuaged a tiny bit of guilt. And I hope it's a good book, that it reveals something about the magic and the mess that must've been the backstory of that label.
But that's not why I opened this file.
I opened this file because when Billy Joe Shaver sings about a Dominecker rooster I don't think most listeners have any idea what he means.
Much less what Sleepy John Estes was on about.
And so I'm tickled to note that on November 2 Stephen Calt published (through the University of Illinois Press, which means this was surely a labor of love, since we all know academic presses aren't rolling in money these days) a nearly 300-page book titled Barrelhouse Words: A Blues Dialect Dictionary. Calt, the one-sheet tells me, has also written or co-written I'd Rather Be The Devil: Skip James and the Blues and King of the Delta Blues: The Life and music of Charlie Patton. Neither of which I know.
Maybe this new volume, a dictionary after all, sounds dry.
I actually think it'd make a great nightstand book, or, for those of you who keep stupid joke books by the toilet, this one might upgrade your ambiance some.
I'm going to open at random and quote one here, to give you a flavor of the thing. And this really is a totally random choice...
raise sand
Cana't a woman act funny, quit you for another man?
She ain't gonna look at you straight but she's always raisin' sand
-- Blind Lemon Jefferson, "Got The Blues," 1926
To create a disturbance, slang derived from the British raise or kick up a dust, given by Grose (1796) as meaning "to make a disturbance or riot." Clapin (c. 1902) records it as a white expression meaning "to get furiously angry"; Tom Shaw (a protege of the above performer) saw raisin' sand as "fussin' and raisin' hell." The survival of this idioom in black speech is indicated by DCS and Smitherman (2000), which (like DAS 3) treat it as exclusively black.
End snippet.
How any of that ties into the Alison Krauss/Robert Plant album, I care not to comment.
Good fun, though, at least for word nerds.
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Comment by hyperbolium.com on November 11, 2009 at 1:17pm -
Terri Gross did interviews related to the King Records book with author John Hartley Fox, musician Bootsy Collins and record executive Seymour Stein. You can find the October 15, 2009 program here.
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Comment by Barry Mazor on November 11, 2009 at 3:01pm -
I have a brief review of the Fox King Records book here:
http://www.americansongwriter.com/2009/09/king-of-the-queen-city-th...
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Comment by Easy Ed on November 11, 2009 at 5:51pm -
I found this one floating out there:
"Outta Sight: A 19th-century lower-class superlative that figures in Stephen Crane's 1893 novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets ('Say Mag, I'm stuck on yer shape. It's outta sight') and Frank Norris' McTeague (1899). Although the term was never associated with black speech, the hippies who adopted it in the 1960s likely acquired it from blacks."
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Comment by J. Hayes - music writer on November 12, 2009 at 7:08am -
Having grown up "in the blues" as it were, musician father, log cabin, tobacco field, NC, GA, all that... I can say that I usually don't have trouble with terminology, yet I am always amused when people intellectualize folk culture which is by definition a changing animal. Remember the whole "ebonics" deal back in the 90's... talk about un-pc. *shudder*
I think I will be picking this book up soon. Thanks for putting me on to it.
Also, gave me a great thought for a new column! Look for a Chess Records (from the inside) interview real soon. I gotta go make a call.
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Comment by Scott Michael Anderson on November 12, 2009 at 8:33am -
Read "Push" by Sapphire if you want a story about life's blues.
Ryan Adams has a book of poetry and short stories called "Infinity Blues", another interesting side effect of love as well.
Scott M. Anderson (Windsor, New York
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Comment by Edd Hurt on November 17, 2009 at 8:08am
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Calt is one of the original white dudes from the '60s delving into blues, and a pretty acerbic critic of same. I worked with him and contributed a small bit to his Skip James book--which is pretty acerbic on the subject of the blues and how it got twisted in the '60s by guys just like him. (I investigated the s0-called "Bentonia school" of guitar playing exemplified by James, and what I found out was that Bentonia, Miss. is too small to have a school of any kind. Ah, the romance of the blues.)
I've talked to Stephen many times on the subject--a very sharp writer. Had this book for a while, and it's great fun. Now you can understand some of those songs. I also recommend his Charley Patton book.
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Comment by Guy on November 17, 2009 at 8:21am -
What a lovely and tight string of words about words. And that's pretty much half of what music is: a Dominecker cock and a willing hen. Mr. Alden has hammered the nail here with his slightly melancholy musings about the fast-disappearing tongue of the blues. When I was a boy in deep South Georgia, I took the word 'jubous' for granted: I knew that it meant 'doubtful.' I heard it first in a song played by the old men who worked with my grandfather in the icehouse of the little fishing village of Darien, Georgia. Only many years later did it dawn on me that the word was a Gullah approximation of the 'town' word dubious. Mr. Alden's analogy with that mean-ass kind of rooster seems perfect: I live in an ancient old farmhouse at the corner of Polo Road and Minorcas Drive and I've yet to meet anyone who knows that a Minorcas is just another yardbird and Polo isn't merely Ralph Lauren aftershave. Nor what a Dream Book is, nor where to buy a root bag. Thank you, Grant Alden.
When words leave us, they seldom come back.
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Comment by mojobone on November 18, 2009 at 8:10pm -
Gotcha root bag right cheer; some words a griot gotta know, boss.
Comment
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